River of Blue Fire, Page 40

  Nothing exploded. No cloud of gas or rain of needle-sharp spikes flew out at them. !Xabbu approached the doorway cautiously, his muzzle close to the ground, head bobbing like a mongoose stalking a snake. Renie said a silent bit of childhood prayer for the little man’s safety.

  Seeing nothing immediately wrong, the baboon took a careful few steps forward, out of sight. Renie held her breath. An instant later, he scampered out again, fur erect along his spine. “Come quickly!”

  The room was empty except for a pile of old clothes lying in the middle of the floor, festooned with coils of tubing. Renie was about to ask !Xabbu what had excited him when the bundle of old clothes lifted its flat, shriveled head. Emily squeaked and backed toward the door.

  “. . . help . . .” it murmured, a tiny dry sound that faded even before it had finished.

  “Jesus Mercy, it’s the Scarecrow.” Renie took a few steps forward, then hesitated. Hadn’t this thing wanted to kill them? But on the other hand, perhaps it could tell them how to get out of this place. Otherwise, they were reliant on Azador, and she was becoming less comfortable with that thought by the minute. “What can we do?” she asked the wrinkled thing on the floor.

  A single finger rose and pointed limply toward one of the doors set in an otherwise featureless wall. She could only hope the thing still had enough brains to know which door was which.

  “I hear the metal men,” !Xabbu announced. “Very loud. Close now.”

  Renie snatched up the Scarecrow, trying not to trip over the spaghetti tangle of tubing. The King of Kansas twisted weakly in her grasp—a remarkably unpleasant sensation, like cradling a burlap snake.

  All this kind of takes the shine off that nice Oz flick, Renie could not help thinking.

  The door opened easily; inside, a stairwell led upward. Emily, her face frozen somewhere between awe and repulsion, snatched up a stray handful of tubes and one of the Scarecrow’s booted feet, which had tumbled loose during the swift collection, and followed Renie, closely trailed by Azador and !Xabbu.

  Something like a boiler room waited at the top of the stairs, pipes cross-connected in a tight grid beneath the ceiling and running up and down the walls. A single chair that might have come from the cockpit of an ancient airplane sat in front of a spot on one wall where all the pipes curved around the imitation wood cabinet of the wall-screen.

  Scarecrow’s head fluttered. He wobbled his hand toward a pipe that ended at right angles to the rest, its protruding nozzle a little more than a meter off the floor. Scarecrow summoned all his strength to take a breath. Renie leaned close to hear his voice whispering out.

  “. . . in chest . . .”

  She looked at the nozzle, then at the limp twist of overalls and flannel shirt that stretched between ribbon legs and empty head. She slid his nearly empty torso onto the nozzle between two buttons of his shirt, impaling him like some medieval torture victim, then held him in place. Nothing happened. One of the Scarecrow’s hands flapped toward a flywheel. When Azador turned it, a hissing sound filled the room.

  The Scarecrow’s torso began to swell first, then his head slowly inflated, too. His legs straightened, unrolling themselves until his overalls were tight as sausage-skin. At last the King of Kansas forced himself away from the nozzle with jointless, balloon arms, and turned stiffly to face Renie and the others. He took his finger from the hole in his chest and let some air leak out until he was a little closer to his old baggy self, then plugged the opening with some spare straw from his lost foot.

  “I’ve got bladders like you couldn’t imagine,” he said by way of explanation, his voice high-pitched and tight. “I can fill them with air in a pinch—and it’s definitely Pinch City around here.” He winked, but his head was so round that the eyelid couldn’t fully close. “This won’t work for long, but it will last until I can make certain neither of those bastards gets to take over Emerald—unless one of them wants to pitch his pup-tent on rubble and hot ashes, that is.”

  “What are you talking about?” Renie stepped forward, half-tempted to yank the straw stopper back out again. “You’re going to burn the place down? What about us?”

  Scarecrow waved a hand. His grin, which pulled his inflated features even tighter, actually squeaked. “Wouldn’t be very generous after you saved me, would it? Fair enough, I’ll let you get out first. But you’d better go now, because I’ve got another few minutes, tops. These Farmer John overalls don’t make for a real tight pressure seal, if you know what I mean.”

  “We don’t know how to get out of here,” Renie said. “Is there . . . is there a crossing place? Like on the river?”

  “A gateway?” The Scarecrow’s scalloped smile widened. “Don’t you even know what they’re called? You really are out-of-towners, aren’t you?”

  “I know what a gateway is,” Azador said tightly. “And I know there is one here in your palace.”

  “Palace!” The Scarecrow wheezed and thumped his knee with a gloved hand. A tiny puff of strawdust flew up. “That’s a good one. You should have seen my ‘cot in the real Emerald City—that was a palace! This—Christ, I think it’s an engineer’s rendering of an old National Guard armory or something. We got it cheap when we were setting the whole thing up.”

  “But there’s a . . . a gateway here?” Renie pressed him.

  “Was. Or rather still is, if you don’t mind wading through about two hundred more of those goddamned mechanical men. It’s in my throne room, behind the wallscreen. But Tinman’s wind-ups have got it now—they have just about everything. Why do you think I dragged my sorry behind all the way over here?” He lifted a few of his tubes and rattled them sadly. “I can’t believe after all this time, it’s over.”

  “I hear the clicking men close by,” !Xabbu announced. “In the big room beneath us.”

  “They won’t get in here,” Scarecrow said dismissively. “Once those doors are closed, it would take them days to break through.”

  “So how do we get out?” Renie demanded.

  The Scarecrow, his neck still a bit overfull, had to turn his whole body to look at her. “I’ll have to think about that. And you want a gateway, right?” He cupped his shapeless chin with one hand and set his forefinger against his pale temple.

  “God damn it!” Azador shouted from the corner of the room. “Get this creature away from me!”

  Renie turned to see Emily take a step backward, lip quivering. The girl finally seemed to have realized her attentions were unwanted. Renie interposed herself between the two of them. “Just stay close to me,” she told the girl.

  “But he was my special henry,” Emily said tremulously. “He called me a pretty little pudding.”

  “Yeah?” Renie shot Azador a disgusted look. “Well, here’s some news from RL—sometimes men are full of shit.”

  The subject of this description rolled his eyes and folded his arms across his chest.

  The Scarecrow clapped his flabby palms together. “Ah! Of course! You can go to the Works. There’s a gateway there, where the River runs through the treatment plants.”

  “The Works?” Azador asked. “That is where the Tinman is strongest.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not watching his own backyard, he’s watching here. Where the endgame is playing out.” The King of Kansas was beginning to deflate. His puffy features took on a worried expression. “But you can’t let him catch this girl. If he gets the Dorothy, the whole game’s over.”

  “This is a game to you?” Renie shook her head in frustration. “All of this, people dead, suffering, and it’s still just a game?”

  Scarecrow was struggling now to hold his head upright. “Just? Are you uttermostly scantagious? I’ve barely been out of this simulation for two years—long enough to change my fluids and filters back in RL and that’s about it. I’ve lost at least fifteen percent of my bone-mass, for God’s sake, at
rophied muscles, you name it! I’ve given everything I had to this simworld, and held onto it even after those whatever-they-are floated in from some other simulation and bumped out my partners. Now I’m going to blow up me and this whole building so that Tinman bastard and his fat crony don’t get their hands on it—which means it will take me weeks to figure a way back in—and you say it’s ‘just a game’?” He rubbed his slack face. “You’re the one who’s out of her mind.”

  “Have you been out recently? Offline?”

  He squinted at her. “Not for a couple of days. But I guess I’ll get a little vacation now, like it or not. Why do you ask?”

  Renie shrugged. “No particular reason.” But she thought, You’ve got a surprise coming, fellow, then realized how callous that was. This person’s life might be at risk—they still had no idea what the apparently changed rules of Otherland meant. “No, that’s not true,” she said. “There’s an important reason. We think something might be wrong with the entire network. People have . . . have been having very strange problems. Unable to go offline. And . . . things that happen here might be affecting them offline, too.” There was no way to explain her worries quickly, but she had to try to warn him. “I think if I were you, I would try to get offline the regular way before I committed virtual suicide.”

  The Scarecrow opened both eyes wide in a look of mock-astonishment, but behind him, Azador appeared disturbed. “Ooh, thank you, little lady. And when I happen into your world, I’ll be sure to give you a bunch of unneeded advice, too.” He turned to Azador, as though deciding that he was the only one worth addressing. “There’s an air-shaft running above this room—just behind that grille, there. You can follow it all the way to the roof if you want, or down to the basement, although you probably don’t want to get stuck in a vertical shaft if you can help it. Got me?”

  Azador nodded.

  “Once you’re out, you can make your way across the city to the river, and reach the Works that way. Or do whatever the hell you want. But you’d better get going, ‘cause I can’t wait forever. About fifteen minutes after I see the last butt disappear into the airshaft, this place is going to go up like a United Nations Day fireworks show. I can’t wait any longer than that. I’m falling apart.”

  !Xabbu walked forward and stood on his hind legs before the straw man, who was sagging badly. “Can you not breathe more air into yourself?” the Bushman asked.

  “I don’t think the seams on this body would hold through another fill-up, and if they rip before I do what I want to do, it’s all over. So get the hell out of here, will you?”

  “Just tell me one thing,” !Xabbu said. “What is the Dorothy you spoke of? You said we must keep the girl safe.”

  “Part of the way this simworld is set up.” Scarecrow’s voice was growing squeaky and thin. “Post-apocalyptic. Nuclear war. Survivors can’t breed. Lots of Auntie Ems, Uncle Henrys, all sterile. So the myth of a girl-child who will be born to one of the emilys. The Dorothy, get it?” He peered from sunken, painted eyes at !Xabbu, who clearly did not. “Oh, go on,” he trilled. “Get out of my face.” He flicked on the wallscreen, which displayed a vision of New Emerald City under siege, a few of its squat buildings on fire and tiktoks rumbling through the damaged streets like two-legged tanks.

  As first !Xabbu then the others struggled into the ventilation duct, Scarecrow raised his flabby arms high. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” he declaimed in a helium squeal. He appeared to be talking to himself, or to the screen. “Attack ships on fire off the shores of the Nonestic Ocean. I watched magic blunderbusses flash and glitter in the dark near Glinda’s Palace. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.” His head sagged with an audible hiss of escaping air. “Time . . . to die. . . .”

  Last into the vent, Renie paused to try once more. “Scarecrow—whoever you are—I’m not just making this up. I think people might be dying from things that happen online. Really dying. There’s something very wrong with the network.”

  The straw man had exposed a hidden panel in the wall, and with great effort was using his wobbly fingers to throw toggle switches, one after the other. “Jeez,” he sighed. “You sure know how to screw up a good exit speech.”

  “But this is important!”

  He shut his eyes and clapped his gloves over the place where ears would have been. “Is someone talking? Because I’m not hearing anything. . . .”

  Renie sighed and turned to crawl after the others.

  Minutes later they tumbled out of the vent and onto the gravel-strewn roof. It was day outside, but just barely. The sky was restless with ugly black clouds, and the hot, damp air smelled of electricity—Renie guessed there had been more tornado attacks while they had been inside. A steady trickle of sweat dripped between her breasts and down her stomach.

  The river appeared to be a good distance into the Works, a dark clot of storage tanks, industrial piping, and lumpish low buildings. After a hurried argument, they decided to make their way across the railyard and then cross the Works at as direct an angle as possible, spending only as much time on Tinman’s territory as they had to on their way to the river. Although they could see small knots of dispirited henrys being herded by tiktoks near the front of Scarecrow’s concrete palace, the service yard below them was empty, so they clambered down a drainpipe to the ground and sprinted toward a siding away from the main line where several railway cars had been abandoned.

  They were sheltering behind the tall wheels of a flatcar, and had just recovered their breath—or !Xabbu had, and the others were getting closer—when a loud but muffled whump knocked the ground from underneath them. Even the massive flatcar bounced, its wheels scraping against the track; for a terrifying moment Renie thought it might tip over and crush them all.

  When the earth had stopped shaking, they crawled past the end of the flatcar and looked back. The innermost section of the Scarecrow’s headquarters had been completely leveled, and much of the rest was hidden by a rising cloud of dust and dark smoke. Bits of ash and debris were beginning to filter down around them in a fine rain.

  “Jesus Mercy,” Renie said. “He did it. He blew himself up.”

  “So?” Azador spat. “Only idiots waste their time on games. We will go now, while Scarecrow’s enemy is trying to find out what has happened.” As if to illustrate his words, those Tiktoks not caught in the blast had already begun swarming toward the ruined palace, beams from their belly-lamps crisscrossing in the murk. “We will slip through the Works without Tinman even noticing us.”

  “How do you know about the Works anyway?” Renie demanded. “In fact, how do you know so much about this whole simworld?”

  Azador shrugged. “I get around.” He scowled. “Enough with questions. If I were you, I would be nice to me. Who took you out of that cell? Who knows the secrets of this place? Azador does.” He pulled out a cigarette and felt for his lighter.

  “We don’t have time for that.” Renie pointed at the sky. “Look at those clouds—there could be another tornado any moment, and we’d be caught in the open.”

  Azador grimaced, but tucked the cigarette behind his ear. “Fine. So lead the way.”

  Like it’s some kind of treat for me, Renie thought. Thanks so much, Mr. Azador.

  Crossing the vast railyard took more than an hour. The open spaces were particularly perilous, and several times they reached shelter only moments before they would have been spotted by one of the roving gangs of mechanical men. As the sky grew darker, orange safety lights smoldered into life around the yard, throwing boxcars and switching stations and derelict engines into stark relief. Renie could not see why Scarecrow and his friends had wasted processing power on a place like this, even if they did get the ingredients cheaply. She could understand building Oz—but a Kansas railhead?

  That was one of the differences between the rich and everyone el
se, she decided. These Otherland people could lavish money and attention on anything that struck their fancies. Unlike ordinary people, they could afford to be crazy.

  The fugitives stopped to catch their breath in a covered freight car. The murk from the destruction of the Scarecrow’s headquarters had spread across the horizon, although it was hard to tell where the cloud of dust left off and the threatening skies began. Despite the growing darkness, the air was hotter now than it had been half an hour before.

  Shielded from spying eyes by the freight car’s walls, Azador had lit a cigarette, and was blowing smoke rings at the low ceiling. He was also pointedly not talking to or even looking at Emily 22813, who crouched a short distance away, watching his every move with naked misery.

  “He knows things,” !Xabbu said quietly to Renie. “Even if you do not like him, we should discover whether he can help us find our friends. To remain separated from them, I think, will only endanger us all.”

  Renie watched as Emily sidled over toward Azador, her hand balled in a pale-knuckled fist. At first Renie thought the girl was going to hit him (which did not bother her in the least, except for the possibility of violent reprisals) but Emily only thrust her hand in front of Azador’s mustached face. Something glittered in her outstretched palm.

  “Do you see?” Emily asked him pleadingly. “I saved it. You told me not to lose it, and I didn’t lose it.”

  “Of course,” Renie breathed, staring at the small golden object. “I completely forgot about it. He gave it to her, didn’t he? That’s what she said.” She stood. “Where did you get that, Azador?”

  He did not look at either of the women. “Get what?”

  “That gem. Where did it come from?”

  He rounded on her, smoke streaming from his mouth and nostrils. “Who are you? Who are you, crazy woman? I do not have to answer your questions! I go where I want, I do what I please. I am of the Romany, and we do not tell our stories to gorgio.”